The Tennessee Volunteers are college baseball’s top-ranked team for a second consecutive week, are winners of eight consecutive Southeastern Conference series and may already have accomplished enough to warrant one of the top eight seeds in the looming NCAA tournament.
They’ve done this without the player who threw their very first pitch of their season.
Sophomore AJ Russell started on the mound for Tennessee’s 6-2 opening triumph over Texas Tech on Feb. 16 at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. The 6-foot-6, 207-pounder from the Nashville suburb of Franklin worked into the fifth inning against the Red Raiders, allowing two runs on three hits and striking out 10 of the 16 batters he faced.
Russell quickly began to experience arm soreness, however, and he last took the mound March 23 against Ole Miss, when he walked six batters and allowed four runs in three innings of relief.
“It’s not like we don’t want to use the weapons we have,” Vols coach Tony Vitello said in a news conference Tuesday night following the 10-0 blanking of Belmont in seven innings, “but if we can have success without him, it buys both of us time. Everyone has to heart his future, and the shorter term of it is next year, when he’ll be a leader of the staff and a huge part of it on the mound.